Energy efficiency offers a vast and low-cost resource to address the future energy demand while reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The unique properties of III-Nitride semiconductors make them an ideal material for the future energy challenges. Their outstanding optical properties are revolutionizing the world with efficient LED light bulbs. Even greater impact is anticipated for power electronics. The much larger Baliga’s figure of merit of GaN compared to SiC and Si enables drastically more efficient power switches, which are at the heart of any energy generation/management system. However, current III-Nitride device performance is far from the fundamental materials capabilities. In this talk, we present the use of nanostructures to optimally exploit these properties in III-nitride devices. We will show that such local nanoscale design can yield nanostructured electronic devices outperforming the state of the art, which offer great potential for energy-efficiency applications.

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Bio

Elison Matioli is an assistant professor in the institute of electrical engineering at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He received a B.Sc. degree in applied physics and applied mathematics from Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France) in 2006 and a Ph.D. degree from the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2010. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) until 2014. His expertise is in semiconductor and nanostructure growth by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD), device fabrication and development of advanced numerical models to simulate device properties. He has received the Outstanding Graduate Student - Scientific Achievement Award for his Ph.D. thesis and the IEEE Electron Devices Society George Smith Award for his demonstration of high-efficiency nanostructured power electronic devices.